Sarah Palin Kicks the Leftist Ant Hill and Goes for Gaia’s Throat

Sarah Palin’s Alaska, which premiered Nov. 14 on TLC, has provoked snarls of cultural condescension, snarky pokes at her political beliefs, and general all-around hissing and spitting from an assortment of America’s Annointed against not just Palin herself, but against what they believe Sarah Palin Represents. The attacks began even before the show’s premier, and have attracted the ire of the gatekeepers of political and cultural rectitude across the leftist spectrum.

The criticism has only snowballed since Nov. 14. and has begun appearing in more specific guises. The Huffington Post reports that a “local Alaskan conservationist” has criticized her for violating “wildlife guidelines” during the show’s filming. The critic, one John Toppenberg, says the brief encounter with two dueling Grizzlies may not “send an appropriate message to large numbers of people that are not experienced at fishing in bear country.” An honest, non-political criticism? Just who is John Toppenberg and what is The Alaska Wildlife Alliance, the group he represents?

Conservationsists? Well, not really. The Alaskan Wildlife Alliance is, as a working knowledge of their website and issue positions will make clear in no time, a leftist environmental activist group who’s primary concern is the ending of the culling of wolves and other predators to preserve prey species populations and to support the reintroduction of large predators to areas in which they have been long absent. There may or may not be good scientific arguments for further limitations on such culling by state biologists and private hunters, but the Alaska Wildlife Alliance claims in its mission statement that its purpose is to “protect Alaska’s natural wildlife for its intrinsic value as well as for the benefit of present and future generations.”

Now, the intrinsic value of wildlife is not a scientific but a philosophical, or even quasi-religious value that, whatever its fundamental merits (and I do believe that nature has intrinsic value in the sense that humans capable of philosophical and religious convictions can attach such value to it), is a core value of the environmental movement that sees nature as having an underlying metaphysical value utterly independent of human presence or knowledge of it. This idea, among others, has led modern environmentalism to its anti-modern, anti-technology, anti-development, and ultimately, anti-humanity mentality that sees even the slightest human “footprint” on the environment as a “rape” of the natural world.

Are John Toppenberg and his group calm, rational, politically unbiased critics careful to engage in civil, rational debate and give all sides a fair hearing? Actually, the group has attacked Palin before, on the issue of wildlife management, in terms quite befitting any of the most extreme and politicized environmental groups.

Sarah Palin is accused of fomenting a “massacre” of wolves and their pups while in thrall to “the corporation and special interests”. Palin, Pablo Escobar-like, runs a “wildlife cartel” that represents the “greatest circumnavigation of ethics, truth, science and morality ever perpetrated on the people of Alaska by their government”.

Not to be outdone, the AWA newsletter Echos speaks of a “war on wolves and bears” in which “barbaric cruelty” describes the motives and methods of those with whom the group disagrees. Field Marshal Palin is responsible, we learn in an Audubon Magazine.org article for “surprise air strikes” against wolves (no doubt John Kerry was in the area at the time, and now has this incident “seared — seared — in me.” Toppenberg himself is quoted in the same article in reference to Palin’s “war”.

Wolves are described in one article as “one of Earth’s pinnacles of intelligence, sentience, and sociality” Perhaps so, but one suspects that local moose, who have little symbolic political value, were not consulted regarding this observation.

A quick look at this educationally vacuous essay on the horrors of the coming destruction of earth due to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) might be enough to give one pause as to the real agenda lying behind Toppenberg’s apparently strictly technical if fussy attack on Palin’s fishing practices.

“While the whole world is going green, in a desperate attempt to save ourselves from ourselves,” opines one article at the group’s website, Sarah Palin is running a “systematic extinction” campaign against wolves and their pups.

The article from which the above quote is taken ends by asking, regarding Sarah Palin’s reign of eco-terror, “Conspiracy? Psychosis? Probably both!”

The irony here may try to escape, but that struggle will be of no avail.